Thursday, March 16, 2017

For 26-year-old Guillaume, the trade-off is all too easy to understand.
In May 2016 he finished his graduate-school training in business law. A
few months later, he decided he didn’t want to work in law after all; he
wanted to play video games. Guillaume likes adventure games, which
allow players to immerse themselves in fantastic and foreign worlds.
During his studies, he could only spare a couple of hours each day for
his habit. Now he can slip into his video-game worlds for five or six
hours at a time. A law career would have meant more money. Yet it would
also have meant much more time spent at law.

(Mutatis mutandis, this is the world-view of many writers. Except, did they but know it, they could probably drastically diminish their real-world exposure if they ditched writing and focused on video games.)

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Terrific piece by Tim Harford in the FT on The problem with facts. (So terrific it is terrifyingly tempting to purloin the whole text from the FT.) Harford talks about the lessons learnt from the response of the tobacco industry to evidence connecting cigarettes with lung cancer, how frequent attempts to discredit a claim unsupported by facts only make it lodge more firmly in the minds of casual onlookers, how the current obsession with bubbles ignores the fact that very few people read serious news (of any ideological tendency) at all.

A couple of quotes:

OK, an attempt to copy and paste a brief quote has, not unfairly, elicited this response from the FT:

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our T&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights.

It's possible that if I checked out the T&Cs I would find a brief quote was acceptable, but sloth prevails. The whole thing here.

Sunday, March 5, 2017

If you want to attract and keep developers, don’t emphasize ping-pong
tables, lounges, fire pits and chocolate fountains. Give them private
offices or let them work from home, because uninterrupted time to
concentrate is the most important and scarcest commodity.

"Most tech company execs will do anything to keep their engineers happy."

Anil Dash is talking about what SF techies could do to stop being hated.

I came to AD via Joel Spolsky (whom I have been following for years); Dash is the new CEO of Fog Creek. The idea that companies want to attract and keep good software engineers is a familiar theme in the annals of Spolsky. It's bad and good for me to look over the fence.

Not to be unkind, I'd like you to imagine translating this sentence to a different sphere.

"Most publishers will do anything to keep their writers happy."

This is not that world.

Writers sometimes get asked whether someone who wants to be a writer should persevere, and they tend to sound rather curmudgeonly in their replies. It sounds churlish to say something like "If you have to do it, you'll do it. Don't do it if it's not impossible to do anything else." It sounds like the lucky few depressing the aspirations of the young and hopeful.

It's not really like that. Writers know they don't live in a world where company execs, or, indeed, the lowliest intern, will do anything to keep writers happy. They don't even live in a world where agents, or, indeed, the lowliest intern, will do anything to keep writers happy. So they live in a world where the odds are heavily stacked against doing their best work, and actually, if you have a choice, you're probably better off being a dev.

It's not that devs don't live in a world where people drive them crazy. Recruiters drive them crazy. Management drives them crazy. Open plan offices drive them crazy. People calling them on the PHONE drive them crazy. They may be required to write code in PHP when every fiber of their being revolts. (There are many languages which may prompt every fiber of their being to revolt.) But -- well, for example, they are not asked to wait months for a program to be debugged by someone who is not a programmer.

Secondhand Sales

The Last Samurai was published in 2000 by Talk Miramax Books. First Talk went under, then Harvey Weinstein split from Disney and Miramax Books handed its books over to Hyperion, then Hyperion dwindled and handed the books back to Miramax who were not, in fact, interested in publishing books.

For a decade of the Miramax Wars readers faced a dilemma. They sometimes want to buy copies of The Last Samurai for friends. It was tempting to buy the book "As New" for $1.70 + $3.99 postage rather than for $14.95 with free shipping in an order of $20 or more, especially if there were many, many friends. The author got nothing on a secondhand sale -- but then, the author would get only $1.12 on the new book. To send the author $1.12 the reader would have to pay an extra $9.24. That's a pretty expensive goodwill gesture.

Goodwill doesn't have to cost that much. PayPal takes 30 cents + 3% on each transaction; if you send the author $1.50 by PayPal she will get $1.15. Many readers sportingly sent a donation - some were insanely generous, all went far beyond the call of duty.

New Directions has now reissued The Last Samurai, so if you want a new copy (or an e-book) you can easily get one. For those who find $0.01+$3.99p&p compelling --we're always grateful for the kindness of strangers.

i+e

John Chris Jones' The Internet and Everyone can be bought for £10: write to jcj AT publicwriting.netJCJ's website has a selection of reviews of this pioneering book.

Berlin

Linguistics

Greek, Latin

RhapsodesSociety for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin: has recordings of Homer, Pindar, many others.

PerseusExtensive body of Greek and Latin texts in the original languages and in translation; offers ability to click on a word for a definition, grammatical information. Also has lexica, grammars, various other resources. NB: the texts are generally editions that are out of copyright rather than modern versions, so the reader is for the most part offered texts reflecting the state of scholarship at the end of the 19th century. The texts also have no apparatus criticus. So it is a useful resource, but one to be used with caution.